Following the launch of its Working Group on Living Lab Foundations & Governance, SOILL continues to strengthen its Soil Community with a second Working Group dedicated to Stakeholder Engagement in Living Labs. Bringing together Soil Health Living Labs with the potential to extend to external stakeholders, the Working Group provides a collaborative space to exchange experiences, reflect on challenges, and explore ways to strengthen stakeholder engagement towards excellence. Like its predecessor, it operates through the SOILL Hub.
About the Working Group
Stakeholder engagement in Living Labs is complex and context-dependent, involving diverse actors across local communities. The Stakeholder Engagement Working Group aims to create a peer-learning community where participants can share practical experiences, reflect on what works and what does not, and co-develop approaches that strengthen participation, build trust, and foster collaboration across Living Lab ecosystems.
Its vision is to move away from stakeholder engagement based on trial and error towards a shared, structured, evidence-informed, and replicable approach, building a collective practice of excellence. By integrating diverse experiences and expertise across Living Labs, the Working Group aims to develop practical guidance and tools that support impactful and effective stakeholder co-participation.
Key Objectives & Priority Areas
The Working Group's objective is to strengthen the quality and impact of stakeholder engagement by fostering peer learning, identifying structural challenges, and co-developing methods adaptable across diverse Living Lab contexts, including different land-use environments. It will support Living Labs in building trust with stakeholders, facilitating inclusive and long-term participation, and translating stakeholder input into tangible outcomes and governance processes.
This is structured around four priority areas:
- Defining excellence in stakeholder engagement: co-developing a shared understanding of what constitutes high-quality stakeholder engagement in Soil Health Living Labs, including the principles, practices, and criteria that support meaningful co-participation, co-creation, and trust-building across diverse stakeholder groups;
- Exchange of practical experiences and peer learning: co-creating a collaborative learning environment where Living Labs can exchange experiences, case studies, and lessons learned from stakeholder engagement practices, moving away from isolated approaches towards a stronger community of practice;
- Inclusive and context-sensitive engagement approaches: exploring and sharing approaches for engaging diverse stakeholder groups across different contexts, including rural, urban, and industrial Living Labs, to ensure engagement methods are better adapted to local communities;
- Monitoring and evaluating stakeholder engagement quality and impact: co-developing approaches for assessing the effectiveness and impact of stakeholder engagement activities, including a shared monitoring, reporting, evaluation, and verification framework that strengthens the evidence base across Living Labs.
Get Involved
In a collaborative and interactive setting, the Working Group will share best practices and lessons learned, creating an open space for reflection and discussion. Alongside drawing from collective experience, participants will also engage with the latest research on effective engagement to inspire new ideas and approaches.
By working together, the Working Group aims to make Living Lab engagement strategies more inclusive, adaptable, and effective, and to innovate how Living Labs work with stakeholders, including those that are more challenging to engage.